Communications devices of various kinds are known in the art including portable, wireless two-way communications devices. Devices that support cellular telephony comprise a particularly ubiquitous example in these regards. Such devices are often configured to initiate a wireless communication by using a particular communications address (such as, but not limited to, a telephone number) as corresponds to a specific entity to be called.
To ease the use of such communications addresses, many devices store contact information. For example, a given device may store one or more contacts lists that correlate one or more communications addresses with each of a plurality of contact identifiers. As a very simple example in these regards, a given contacts list might include the names of a plurality of persons along with a telephone number as corresponds to each such person. To further ease the use of such information, many devices permit a user to identify a particular contact by name (using, for example, a voice-recognition capability). The device then uses that name to access such a contacts list to identify the communications address to use to initiate a call to that particular person.
It is possible, however, for a given contacts list to include two or more contacts who share a same name. Such instances can be especially numerous when the user only stores a single name (such as only the given name or only the family name) for some or all of their contacts. When such a situation occurs the device will typically further prompt the user in some way in order to disambiguate between the candidate contacts in order to identify the appropriate communications address to use. For example, the device may use a text-to-speech capability to audibilize the telephone numbers for each candidate contact in order to help the user identify the correct person to call.
Typical disambiguation approaches in these regards, however, do not necessarily meet the needs of all users. Some users, for example, may not recall the telephone number of the person they are calling. In such a case, it may not be helpful to provide such a user with the telephone numbers of the candidate contacts. Instead, such approaches can delay or completely frustrate the desired communication while possibly aggravating the user as well.